Tuesday, 13 November 2012

Multifaceted

The election season is finally over, with a
result which turned out to be not quite the clincher I expected; President
Obama won handily, and with him came a government which is capable of
entertaining multiple views, including the mix of social conservatism and
economic populism which I favour (though this is not likely to be the reigning
philosophy of the Obama Administration, at the very least the conservative
Democratic voice will not go unheard).

In his recent address he noted, with
more than hints of the liberal internationalism that we should generally come
to expect from his foreign policy, that in distant lands people were still
risking their lives in order to argue about substantive policy issues (or at
least pretend to do so in incredibly extravagant and intolerably lengthy shows
of orchestrated posturing every bit as fake and emotionally manipulative as
pro-wrestling, the way we do).

This certainly is true, but the big question to
be asked is who exactly these people are and what the substantive expressions
of that argument will end up being. The nations most closely affected by the
Arab Spring were doubtless at the forefront of his mind when he said this – it
remains a reasonable question what course of action the newly-elected
governments and coups which have taken place in the region will set their
countries on. Of course, the role of religion vis-à-vis the state will
be, there as much as here if not more so, a most prominent issue. Islam – in
various forms – will be the religion in question.

I have not talked much about Islam on this blog,
partly because there are those who are infinitely more qualified to do so than
I am – Naj at Neoresistance,
for one. But the more I read about Islam in its public expressions, the more
complicated the picture of it appears to be – unlike those who read about Islam
only to find things about it to hate and revile (people like Pamela Gellar,
Geert Wilders, Bruce Bawer, Richard Spencer, Anders Behring Breivik and so
forth), I recognise a multifaceted religion when I see it.

There is an Islam which produces magnificent and
beautiful works of art; and an Islam which demolishes them. There is an Islam
which promotes good scholarship, careful study and critical thinking; and an
Islam which eschews all three. There is an Islam which speaks and appeals to
women; and an Islam that silences them. There is an Islam which preaches
justice to God’s poor and needy; and an Islam which plays power politics at
their expense.

Generally, there is a lot to admire in Islam: their hard-nosed
stance against usury – something which much of Christianity, to its detriment,
has lost; their emphasis on daily devotion and practice as a central component
of faith; their requirement that faithful believers donate a small portion of
their income (zakat) directly to the poor. The cultural achievements of
near Eastern countries like Iraq and Iran are practically unparalleled anywhere
in the world. But then I look at places like Syria and Libya, like East
Turkestan and Albania and Yugoslavia, like Russia and Pakistan – and I think:
is this the same religion?

Much ink has been spilt over the past eleven
years on the topic of how to analyse the Islamic world and faith. Among the
most useful analyses has been the discussion by Amitai Etzioni of the
distinction between the ‘warriors’ and the ‘prayers’ – and the need to
recognise that the illiberal moderates amongst the Muslim faithful are
not the West’s enemies, even though they do not share the liberal values of the
modern West. This is a very helpful distinction, and I think it does a good job
of sketching the outline of an explanation for the appeal Islam is having in a
postmodernist, post-secular world. Dr Etzioni is a sociologist, however, and is
thus interested primarily in behaviours.

There is also a theological distinction to make,
though, which is related. It strikes me that there have always been these two
Islams: even the Shia-Sunni split was characterised by a conflict between those
who sought a social-justice interpretation of the teachings of the
Prophet, and those who sought a power-political interpretation. The
followers of Ali (shi’at Ali) were insistent upon an Islam whose primary
job was to care for the sick and the lost, and Ali himself gained a very large
following amongst the Muslim lower classes.

Ultimately, Ali was assassinated by
his political rivals, and his son Husayn was killed and mutilated by his militarily-superior
rivals when he revolted at Karbala… but that a righteous king would return in
the form of the Mahdi to end all forms of oppression and usher in a reign of
peace and equality. The Shiite tradition combined with the social-justice,
righteous kingship and scholastic traditions of Zoroastrianism in Iran to
create a highly-cultured and -scholastic, but at the same time
egalitarian-trending theological tradition which has lasted in that nation to
this day – and whose colourful history includes the Abbasids, the Qarmatians
and the Iranian democratic and nationalist movements.

In truth, of course, the distinction is nowhere
near so cut-and-dried as all that. Within the Sunni tradition, too, there
certainly are a solid majority which are justice-oriented, scholastic and
peaceable. But it seems worthy of note that the very strains of revivalist,
fundamentalist Sunni Islam (the Salafis most notably) which promote political
violence as the preferred means of getting what they want, are the same ones which
are most willing to cooperate with the geopolitical aims of the United States
when it suits them – playing by the rules of power politics, rather than by the
principles of their religion. This was the case in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.
And in the erstwhile Yugoslavia in the 1990’s – not to mention in Russia and in
China. Then in Iraq with the fundamentalist Sunni insurgents bought off in 2007
to save the face of Bush 43; then what would go on to become the genocidal NTC
in Libya; now the ‘Free Syrian Army’, which is none of the above.

Of course, the question will be asked as it
always is: ‘which is the true Islam’? Well, if Islam means ‘submission’, then
it is a question of whether one submits to the will of the God of Abraham,
Moses and Jesus – you know, the one who sent all those prophets to tell off his
chosen people for abusing the poor, and who sent his only begotten Son to
minister to the indebted, the unclean, the sick and the socially-outcast – or
whether one submits to the will of the modern-day equivalent of Babylon.

So far, that fundamentalist strain isn’t looking
too hot, when it comes to following their Prophet’s dictates about whom to
worship, and how, and why.

On the other hand, the forms of Islam which keep
open seats at the table (often literally, in the cases of Lebanon, Syria and
Iran) for members of their brothers and sisters in Abraham; those which still
preach public ownership of common goods; those which still value the practice
of charity and justice over political dominance; these forms do a better job of
keeping the common spirit of the People of the Book.

However, both the
fundamentalist Sunnis who always show up to fight neoconservative wars, and the
Islamophobes who repeatedly show up at the ballot box to vote for neoconservative
candidates both in the United States and Europe, consistently demonstrate their
useful idiocy to that same movement: a Trotskyist tendency which may have
gleefully abandoned its former concern for the global working poor, but which
has not abandoned its former tactics and tricks.

On which John sagely comments:

Great post. An interesting example of a strain of
Islamic thinking with an emphasis on social justice would be the Red Shi'ism of
Iranian author Ali Shariati.